Freeze in Jaunty

[Laysan_A]

Hi,

I just upgraded to karmic yesterday. I had my first "freeze to black" today, as I was making another post in this forum, as a matter of fact. I was hoping I was done with all that. Oh well. I can't believe I've allowed myself to actually get used to and expect the occasional crash! I can barely remember what it was like before, to just run and run with no instability. But I can't imagine myself going back to windows either.

I spent a lot of time in this thread early on with jaunty, and I finally just lost heart. The one thing I didn't do (though there were others here who did - to no avail) was to wipe it clean and start over. I'm an idiot, well, inexperienced, and I didn't format my drive to have a separate home partition. Now I have almost 300GB of stuff on it that I don't want to lose. It's mostly pictures and videos. It will take me forever to migrate it off at 4.5GB a pop (no, I don't see a usb drive in my immediate future).

@dspisak
I did one bios upgrade about a year ago, but I'll go check again. You haven't had any luck with fglrx? I haven't since intrepid (which worked great all around).

I notice you're from the east bay. I lived in concord years ago - I was stationed near the naval weapons station. I miss the short winters, but I don't miss the too dry summers or the constant earthquakes.

[billharris]

I do feel for you. I went to Linux because I like *ux systems and because I really like extremely stable systems. Hardy and Intrepid were stable. Jaunty started stable and went downhill. I was pretty frustrated near the end.

When I upgraded to Karmic, I, too, still had crashes. At someone's suggestion, I reinstalled from scratch, and it's been quite stable ever since.

That was made easier by having a separate /home.

Even if you think Ubuntu is the ultimate stable system, hard drives don't last forever, so an external backup drive is a very good idea for anyone. I use rsync-backup for backup, and that could make it easy for you to dump off your /home and start over. I know: money does matter.

[Laysan_A]

Yeah, that sounds like my idea of heaven - painless migration of my entire directory. I really should just start over. I'm having problems with my apt system too, so I can't even reliably update.

[pveurshout]

I am having exactly the same problem with 9.10, any file transfer of a large file across the lan will most certainly put it to freeze and would require a reboot to recover. Any ideas as to what I need to try please. I am very new to ubuntu and getting very frustrated with this problem, thanks!

Have you tried using different kernel versions? I haven't had this problem with 9.10, but for 9.04 some kernels worked whereas others locked up all the time.

[Laysan_A]

I thought I should update this thread, since I'm a pretty big part of it, and because I finally resolved my issue.

I was still experiencing my characteristic freezes to black through karmic and into lucid. I still couldn't figure out how to even debug them. On the day I finally fixed them I had two or three crashes in a row, just before I applied the fix (of course I didn't know it was a fix at the time ).

I had been using gkrellm for years. For a long time, I was satisfied enough with the k8 sensor output for my temps. that I didn't bother trying to configure for the atk0110 sensors, even though they're more accurate. I lived with the less than accurate numbers of the k8, relying on the tendency of rising and falling to keep me aware of what was going on.

When I installed lucid I decided to finally get on the ball and get it done because I found I could get perfectly good atk0110 readings from ksensors (actually discovered that in karmic). So I started looking. I found out by running gkrellm in konsole that it hadn't been compiled with libsensors support. I couldn't figure out why. So I went on the web to look for answers.

It turns out that ubuntu stopped compiling gkrellm with libsensors support in 2007, apparently because there was a short window where libsensors had done a major update and gkrellm had not updated to accommodate the libsensors update. This was a smart move, however, when gkrellm was patched, a week or two later, ubuntu failed to re-include libsensors support in its compiled versions. The original decision stands, that it was done for "safety reasons".

I found a bug report on this in launchpad, along with the recommendation to compile myself. I went to the gkrellm site and downloaded the tarball, compiled it on my machine (libsensor support is the default), and voila, atk0110 sensor support - and not a single crash since.

So, something about having gkrellm installed without libsensor support when I had libsensors configured for both k8 and atk0110, caused the crashes. Interestingly (or not...), when I was using the k8 output I would continually have to re-enable them in gkrellm (go to the configuration dialogue and tic the boxes) because they would disappear each time I shut my machine off.

(It seems the removal of libsensor support in gkrellm now has just the opposite effect to the one intended.)

So...my particular issue is RESOLVED!!!!!

[DarkTide]

I have an HP Pavilion DV7-1006TX (FN374PA ) . I have been running every release since Gutsy Gibbon till Intrepid Ibex. I've tried to install Jaunty on ext4 as it comes after some work in GIMP the system freeze out for 5-10 seconds. this didn't happened in the older release, no sir! I thought is because of the ATI driver and I've installed the ATI driver X.Org from the Add/Remove... and after my restart I couldn't get into the desktop any more.

[Caraibes]

Since I had posted in this thread about 2 or 3 years ago, back when I had issues with Jaunty, I am still receiving updates in my email inbox.

So I have to be honest, and give you a sincere feedback, right ?

I am now running Lucid (10.04.x), single-boot on an older MacBook 2.1 (the white one, from early 2007, a hand-me-down). This is my main computer.

I have some PPA enabled (Libre Office, Firefox Stable, Google Stable & Testing, Pidgin etc...), running mostly Gnome, sometimes Xfce, Fluxbox, Lxde...

I removed all Mono apps, Evolution, Ubuntu One, Empathy etc...

I never had a single problem since I "inherited" this laptop, back in November... I gladly wiped OSX 10.4, which was totally obsolete...

No freeze whatsoever, hence my post today in this thread !

[Laysan_A]

@DarkTide

If I may give a little advice...

This is an old thread about an issue that really doesn't match yours very well. You likely won't get any help in this thread.

Why don't you start your own thread in the beginner's forum, then come back and edit your post here to include a link to your new, main post, so people won't think you're just cross posting. I think you'll have much better luck with you own thread.